Scalable computing provides a solution to today's varying demands for processing resources when managing a data center or distributed database system. A provider provisions a common pool of hardware resources to handle incoming requests from a plurality of clients. As demands grow for the provider's service, the provider may add additional hardware resources to the pool. Virtual Machines (VMs) enable many logical computers to share the common pool of hardware resources. For example, a cluster of three nodes (i.e., three independent processors, each processor having a set of independent resources such as hard disk drives (HDDs), network interface controllers (NICs), graphic processing units (GPUs), or the like) may host tens or hundreds of independently executing VMs, each VM running a separate and distinct instance of an operating system that can run software (e.g., an Apache server) for providing services to the clients.
In some instances, data management may be handled by a virtual file system. In other words, a logical storage device may include data distributed among one or more real storage devices such as HDDs. Poorly managed virtual file systems can affect the performance of the virtual machines when the files accessed by the virtual machines are stored in an inefficient manner. Thus, there is a need for addressing this issue and/or other issues associated with the prior art.